Subterranean magazine, Winter 2008 issue

Looks like they fill out the online magazine's table of contents slowly. When I checked on 5 January 2008, it only had one complete written story. Plus sundry other articles.

Here is some commentary on what I found interesting enough to actually bother reading; will likely add to it as the issue gets filled out over the quarter. My rating is in brackets (ABC: A = time well spent; C = don't bother).

1. [non fiction] Elizabeth Bear's "Congratulations" (A); download: 15-point advice for artists on how to handle fans & critics. Very readable.
2. [ss] Michael Bishop's "The Pile" (B); download: Non-genre. Generally readable description of the life in not well off housing society. Title refers to a location on society premises where households can dump junk that may be useful for someone else - like a TV set that doesn't work. This location serves as a kind of place to socialize.
   

Legend: ss = short story.

Elizabeth Bear's "Tideline" (short story, science fiction, free): An emotional robot teaches life skills to an urchin

General feel of this story is a lot like a typical Asimovian robot story - except the robot here can kill humans. In fact, it's a battleship robot - designed to kill the (human) enemy.

Download full text or MP3.

Story summary.

Chalcedony is a war machine - sounded like a kind of technologically very advanced tank with integrated AI (artificial intelligence). It thinks of itself as a "she".

There apparently has been a war somewhere near Seattle in the US. The war is now over; Chalcedony's platoon is dead, & she is badly damaged - only a little life remaining.

She is prawling a beach looking for bead-like objects. To build little memorial trinkets for various members of her platoon! She is a rather sentimental robot.

On the beach, she encounter a little boy, Belvedere, - somehow surviving. They slowly come close. She helps him in many ways - with finding food, by saving him from bigger looters, by teaching him, etc.

Collected in.

1. Gardner Dozois (Ed)'s "The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection" (2008).
   

Fact sheet.

"Tideline", short story, review
First published: Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2007.
Rating: A
Winner of Hugo Awards 2008 in short story category.
Added to my best of the year 2007 picks.

Elizabeth Bear's "Black is the Color": Monster hunting girls

Dark fantasy; full story text here.

Kelpie is a race of sea-dwelling shape-shifting horse-monster predators. Story is of hunt & killing of a young girl, already sexually abused by her dad, by Uisgebaugh, a member of this monster species.

First published: Subterranean, Summer 2007.
Rating: C